There are only about 320,000 people living in Iceland. A small island nation, it’s also isolated from the rest of the world, so you don’t have a lot of immigration, historically, and therefore, you don’t have a lot of genetic diversity. In some sense, the vast majority of Iceland’s population are branches from the same family tree. So In 1997, a medical genetics research company called deCODE teamed up with the makers of computer anti-virus software to map it out. Using data from virtually every available source, the company now claims to have “genealogical information about the inhabitants of Iceland, dating more than 1,200 years back.”

If you have an Icelandic ID number (called a “kennitala”), you can log onto the Islendingabok (literally, “the Book of Icelanders”) and look up your genealogy. It’s a great tool if you’re single and want to avoid likely embarrassment before taking the relationship to the next level. As one Icelander told USA Today, “everyone has heard the story of going to a family event and running into a girl you hooked up with some time ago. It’s not a good feeling when you realize that girls is a second cousin.” Check the database, though, and you can avoid that.

This is interesting, certainly. But more importantly, as far as I can tell there’s no iOS app that mines this data, only an Android solution. So get cracking, iOS devs, Iceland needs you.

tylernol

would be fun to crank this out, but I cannot get access to the database without being a citizen apparently.